A Rock and a Hard Place

by George Zelt PhD

  Their premise was flawed and their treatment of me was wrong. I was on the bottom rung, so what did I have to lose? I had two months left before the final payment of my research grant. I’d finished 80 percent of my fieldwork. It was time to attack Afrikaner Joost’s and Professor NASA’s glory.

  To do that, I would need enormous staying power. I would have to eat buckets of shit for the next two months, until hopefully I could think straight and dig my way out of the terrible situation I was in. I stopped discussing the subject with others and painfully absorbed all the pitiful looks I was given as I carried on my work in the PRU as best as I could with the data I had. I talked only to Patrick and Catina, who both understood.

  Now that I unequivocally understood I would no longer be associated with UCT, that I was indeed thrown out and no one would help me there, a plan crystallized. I would have to seek help outside UCT from someone who knew South African geology.

  This wasn’t easy, as I was a foreigner in the country and the only people I knew were associated with UCT. Also, I was going against an Afrikaner. This increased the odds against me, and I realized it was possible my pushing back could make the situation even worse.

  * * *

  I remembered a friend of mine, Dr. Martin Jackson. I’d met him when I first arrived at the PRU; he was in his final year of PhD studies then. Now he lectured at the competitive University of Natal, on the opposite—east—coast of South Africa, at Pietermaritzburg. It was not far from the large city of Durban. Martin specialized in metamorphic petrology and structure geology—just the combination I needed.

  I called Martin and explained my findings. He said he understood and was curious. Curiosity in a scientist is magic. He was also from Rhodesia, which meant he was not unduly influenced by Afrikaner power. Had my luck changed? His own PRU research area, although much farther afield from mine, had, he admitted, made him wonder then about Joost’s findings. As I was no longer associated with any university, he suggested I apply to where he lectured. He offered to be my advisor if I was accepted.

  But, I wondered, do I have enough data yet? Will this work?

  I needed another trip to the field to examine one remaining area. I drove my old car. I hoped it wouldn’t break down, especially when I loaded rocks in it. I lived from the trunk like a gypsy. I didn’t tell anyone except Patrick and Catina I was going. I was wary of what Joost would do if he found out I was not going to give up. Could he use his considerable influence to try to block my admission to the University of Natal? I believed anything was possible. After all, he’d stopped me so far. So, secrecy was essential; secrecy was part of the battle plan to outflank him.

  I spent what money I had on gas, ate bread, and drank coffee. The African insects buzzed and the whole earth was my bed. Tattered clouds, like my life, floated across the blue sky. In the morning, heat waves rose. The billion-year-old rocks had talked to me, and I owed it to them to tell their story accurately.

  It felt good to get out of the geology department building. I didn’t belong there. Some people were embarrassed by my presence, not sure if I really was wrong and perhaps guiltily wondered if they should take my side, while others preferred to see me as someone who’d falsely bucked the system they felt quite comfortable in.

  My old car didn’t travel well with its weak brakes and its risky steering. After three weeks I would return to UCT in as ragged condition as that car.

  While in the field, I met a new PRU geology student named Alan, who kindly helped me collect some rocks. His field area overlapped a portion of mine. I explained Joost’s findings were incorrect, thinking it would help him avoid presenting erroneous information in his dissertation. He replied honestly, “I want my degree,” and that Joost was responsible for bringing him to the PRU. In other words, Joost must have told him he expected Alan to support his findings.

  Maybe Alan didn’t believe me, but I think he just wanted to take the easy way out. On that note, it fascinated me that in the mornings when he woke, he would lazily walk to the very edge of the small awning in front of his trailer and pee rather than taking a few extra sanitary steps. Unfortunately, Alan reported to Joost about where I’d been, but I was able to keep them in the dark for almost a month. For my second and final month I continued working away in polite silence. There was a lot of tension. The whole department wondered why I didn’t give up. “What is George going to do?” they quizzed Catina and Patrick again and again, all trying to find out and rat to Joost and Professor NASA. My two friends said nothing.

  Within days of my return, Professor NASA strangely made the geology department’s complex microprobe analyzer equipment available to me for a four-day holiday weekend. I didn’t understand why and didn’t ask. Perhaps he had a change of heart? No, I couldn’t let myself be sucked into that false rubbish anymore. More than likely, he and others suddenly wanted to know about my findings and then influence anything I might present. Plus, they likely didn’t want anyone to say I didn’t get a fair chance—they were covering their asses.

  No matter; I needed the data and played the game back at them, struggling to smile and say thank you. They saw only what they wanted to see. The horns of David and Goliath were locked.

  When the time came and the machines became available, I hardly slept for those four solid days. I never left the building. Catina, a remarkable woman, shuffled food to me and lots of coffee. Day and night I analyzed as many specimens as I could. Twenty hours a day I worked as only the young can do. I slept on the floor. When the printouts came rolling out of the machine, I watched with tired eyes and was ecstatic; the data supported all I had said.

  To a scientist, facts are strength. My God, I was right. It was the first time in a long while I truly smiled. Catina said she finally saw life back in my eyes. I would have to go through the data in detail to be doubly certain, however. In the meantime, I told no one.

  The end of the month came. In silence I packed my documents, books, and selected rocks and retreated with them from the university to the nearby apartment I’d rented with Patrick two years earlier.

  It’s true there is no middle way in Africa, I thought. It’s either death or life, lose or win.

  Was it their turn to lose?

  Chapter 14

  The Beginning of Environmental Science

  Looking around my apartment, I recalled the past two years of my life: a small wagon wheel wired as an overhead light, which I had taken from The Oasis. A dozen spent mortar shells from the 1915 South African–German war that Patrick and I had found in the Prohibited Area. A hundred-year-old black cast-iron Afrikaner cooking pot I’d removed from the sands in South West Africa.

  Special rocks Patrick and I had collected adorned our shelves, such as an eighteen-inch-long, egg-shaped nodule of beautiful green malachite; another with black tourmaline crystal prisms embedded in it rested on the floor. There was blue copper ore, green and blue diamond pipe rock, and a two-foot-long, six-inch-wide slab of the extraordinary blue lace agate sitting on a bookcase.

  I reminisced then, remembering another challenge. I was seventeen, it was the 1960s, and I’d hitchhiked across the United States from Buffalo to Chicago and then north to the Dakotas and west across the Badlands to Seattle, Washington. From there I went north to Mile Zero on the dirt and gravel Alaskan Highway and then west to Haines Junction (historic mile 1016) in Yukon Territory, Canada. My goal was Juneau, the capital of Alaska, where my brother worked. As there were no roads into Juneau, I took a ferryboat to get there. I returned via the length of California to Bakersfield, went east on Route 66 through the Mohave Desert, and then on to the Great Plains of Oklahoma, to Chicago, and home to Buffalo. I carried two large double-sided cards. On the first I’d printed “North” on one side and “South” on the other; the second card had “East” and “West” on it. I stuck the signs between two ropes that bound my old suitcase together. I slept in hedges, cornfields, and deep within mosquito-laden forests. If I could do that, I should be able to face the homela
nds of Natal.

  In the meantime, I had to get there and that meant considering: What would come next?

  The answer came soon enough.

  Several weeks passed while I worked in my apartment, compiling the analytical data I’d collected. On Sundays I roasted a chicken for Patrick and Catina. Joining us one afternoon was an untidy Australian geology student named Marcus. Bearded and with dull red hair, he wore loose-fitting, dreary gray clothing with a burnished patch on his knee. We were the same; our economic status precluded pretensions. We’d met Marcus about a year before at a local student bar when he visited Cape Town on vacation, and we kept in contact. He was from a farm in the outback and now took graduate geology courses at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg part-time.

  I brought the roasted chicken to the table, which sat under a tattered wall map displaying spattered grease spots on the African continent.

  “It would be nice to travel a bit into Africa,” Catina said wistfully.

  “Now seems a good time,” Marcus said.

  Our eyes turned upward to the map. It was a standard Mercator projection, most accurate near the equator, which we were not so far from. Often Patrick and I had gazed at it, musing about various sights to be seen. I stood and used a thighbone to point with as we discussed locations to our immediate north. A few minutes later we made the decision to drive northwest to the Limpopo River. From there we would enter Botswana and cross a portion of the enormous Kalahari Desert on our way to the great Okavango Delta. Then, we’d turn east to Victoria Falls and the Zambezi River and enter Rhodesia. Probably in Bulawayo—I saw an airport key on the map there—I would get a plane for Nairobi, Kenya, and later fly home to see my family in New York. The others would travel back to South Africa. At that point we’d have traveled about five weeks.

  “That’s about two thousand miles to Bulawayo over rough roads,” Catina said, holding a wing delicately. We knew she had to stay behind and work. “You know they are having a civil war in Rhodesia?”

  Patrick looked up again from his potatoes (an escaped piece had lodged in his beard), adding, “There’s also gold in a stream there, according to George.”

  “Well,” I said, “the white hunter showed me a nugget. Anyway, we can decide on that part later.”

  We roughed out the whole trip in two hours or so. It would take us into an Africa we hadn’t seen before, and that meant adventure. The major cost would be for gas, which was cheap then. We would sleep on the ground and eat available local food. Standing, we made a three-way handshake on it. “If all goes well,” I added, “I’ll borrow plane fare from my family in the US and then fly back here, collect my car, and drive to Natal to continue my studies.”

  A week later, I said a final goodbye to Portuguese Catina. Emotions don’t travel well. We knew there was just no other way. We were students full of life, and these past two years had been stressful. I was finished here. I had to face that. In the end, most people were probably glad to see me go.

  * * *

  It was a sensitive day, a traveler’s day. Patrick and I started off in my old car on the way to Johannesburg, where we would meet Marcus and then drive his Land Rover north.

  We moved slowly, limiting strain on the car and conserving gas money. I had forgotten to tell Patrick that the gas gauge didn’t work well. In the first fifteen miles, the needle dropped from a full tank to three-quarters. I could almost watch it move toward empty.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it!” Patrick gasped as he focused wide eyes on the gauge.

  “Almost time for gas,” I replied with a straight face.

  “Bejesus, we’ve only gone a few miles!”

  “It’s an old car,” I said.

  “‘It’s swallowing gas like a drain! We’ll be broke in fifty miles and pushing it all the way to Jo’berg.”

  “Aw, it’s the gauge. Look.” I rapped it with my knuckles and sent it toward the full side.

  We drove northeast into the huge flatlands of the Free State. It had a no-ending feeling, a bit like being pushed in a rowboat into the ocean. Sheep milled together on the road as sheep do. Signs said Bowen se melk en produkte in Afrikaans: “Milk for sale.” Farther on, we passed small, baked-white houses seemingly out of a fairy tale in dorps—small settlements—not noted on our map. People lived around watering holes as isolated as a pinprick on a sheet. By the time we thought about stopping, we were well past them.

  Our car moved slowly but steadily, mile by mile. The road was thin, isolated, and went straight to the horizon. I had traveled such roads before; they were like following a string to nowhere.

  Marcus was waiting for us in Johannesburg. We left my old car in a university parking lot and drove toward the Botswana border at Ramotswa. It was one of many out-of-the-way crossings over the Limpopo River, which divides South Africa and Botswana. Some of the crossings are closed during periods of high water because the bridges are underwater.

  I’d been there before, on a short geology field trip, marveling at the imposing pinkish-gray baobab trees, smooth, shiny, and unchanged since prehistoric times—some living for as many as two thousand years. The early farmers said if the tree failed to bloom in October, the harvest would be meager. Legend says that a python lived in one gigantic baobab; it granted fine crops and good hunting when worshipped. The first white hunter arriving there killed it, and a disastrous crop and other consequences soon followed. I don’t know about the legend, but on another occasion, while walking along and reading a map in that area, I tripped over a python sunning itself. I sprinted away and he continued his nap.

  Armed border guards made us unload all of our goods for inspection. Our rough field appearance, accents, long hair, and the beards on Patrick and Marcus prompted questions concerning our objectives.

  Were we mercenaries? they asked.

  “Don’t look so wild, Marcus,” I whispered, noting his neglected hair had escaped in untidy waves from each side of his baseball cap.

  “What the hell do you think you look like?” he shot back.

  Crossing into Botswana was emotional for me; once I left South Africa, I could not return. Unlike my friends’ documentation, my entrance visa would expire, as UCT would not extend it. Once over the line I would enter a third world country and be subject to its laws.

  The white border guard looked at me. “Are you sure you want to leave our country? One step over the line,” he said as if reading my mind, “and you can’t return.”

  My friends looked at me. The question hung in the air like a tear in an eye. It really was a scary decision.

  I scanned ahead, across the border: black guards, a few shacks, and a road into the trees. What then? I remembered the remote Alaskan Highway that I had walked years before as I crossed North America. It drove straight to an enormous forest and never really emerged. Some things are like that, one step more and nothing is the same again.

  “Talk about reaching the Rubicon,” I said, drawing on courage. With that, I sighed, looked at the guard, and stepped daringly over the broad line into Botswana as they all watched me.

  “That was kind of theatrical, George,” Patrick said quietly as he caught up with me while Marcus drove across the border.

  “It was also creepy,” I replied as I tried to reach whatever was biting me on my back.

  “Well, you seem to handle it okay.”

  “I seem to be getting tested too much lately,” I mumbled, looking at Botswana while stopping to rub my back against their flagpole.

  Via a combination of asphalt and sandy streets, we reached Botswana’s capital, Gaborone, not far from the border. The town’s center was ill defined, as the buildings were mostly one story, with later additions crawling in various directions. They were spaced like an old man’s teeth—with plenty of gaps. Paths led between the spaces, and people parked haphazardly at each building’s entrance. In the middle of the city, we parked the Land Rover on a sand rise and partially under a scraggly acacia tree.

 
; Dust rose in the hot air as people shuffled their feet and socialized. Tribal women dressed in bold flowing gowns with large turbans of bright material twisted around their heads disappeared into buildings and around corners. Many in the streets balanced on their heads what Western people would carry in their hands. Men in sandals had cloth wraparounds, off-the-shoulder rough cloth, and dusty robes; they carried sticks and spears as they wandered from one thorny acacia to another. Mixed in with this were Western jeans, skirts, T-shirts, dress shirts, hats, and shoes of all kinds.

  Abundant wild trees grew at will, or at least until someone decided they were in the way. There were bleating goats tied to most of them with long rope leads. Few leaves existed below the level the animals could reach while standing on their hind legs. Bare spider-like branches remained. Weary donkeys slept waiting for their owners, their tails continually flicking at flies. Thin dogs lurked in the shadows. Mostly, they slept and scratched.

  Gaborone was a friendly, loose kind of place. It was the capital of an African country run by rural Africans, who still had wilderness in their eyes. It was a frontier town in that there was no pollution from progress. It was a town I liked.

  Now, forty years later, I understand Gaborone is one of the fastest-growing cities on the continent. It has modern high-rise buildings, a hospital, a five-star hotel, schools, recognizable government offices, and other structures that would be found in a Western city.

  At Gaborone, we bought food and fresh items that generally cannot be taken across a border. With a month’s supply of goods, we backtracked to Ramotswa and then to Lobatse and began to follow the only road north to Phuduhudu, Kang, and finally Ghanzi, which sat near our goal, the great Okavango Delta.

  To get there we had to travel four hundred miles or so of untarred trans-Kalahari road. The red roads of Africa. The Kalahari Desert is a large arid to semiarid sandy area that has some small amounts of rainfall, which means it’s not a true desert. It is massive; the bulk of it stretches over three countries, 80 percent of it in Botswana. Surrounding it and extending into other countries is the similar Kalahari Basin. Together they constitute one of the emptiest landscapes on the entire planet and can be seen from space. And we were to enter it in an old Land Rover? Youth is hopeful.